Page 3128 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 9 November 2021
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commonwealth, as you are prone to do, are you as frustrated by the situation as Professor Abhayaratna suggests you should be?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: Yes, Madam Speaker.
Municipal services—Lanyon dog park
MR DAVIS: My question is to the Minister for Transport and City Services. Just prior to the lockdown I met with a constituent of mine in Theodore who showed me a vacant and under-utilised parcel of public land that she currently using as a dog park. You can imagine my delight in the budget that there was money allocated for a brand new dog park in the Lanyon Valley. Could you give the Assembly an update on the government’s work to identify an appropriate site for the dog park?
MR STEEL: I thank Mr Davis for the question. I am very pleased to provide an updated on the delivery of ACT’s Labor election commitment to design and construct a new dog park in this term of government in the Lanyon Valley. This builds on our government’s previous investments in dog park infrastructure over the previous term and complements the reforms that have been undertaken recently around animal welfare and improving outcomes for dogs in particular but also cats.
In releasing the Canberra dog model with documented best practice, the government highlighted the importance of providing dog exercise areas as an opportunity for socialisation, and dog parks are an important way to do that. The government is currently considering a range of sites in the Lanyon Valley for this project. To determine a suitable site, considerations need to be made around the block size—ideally that this would be a size around 4,000 metres squared. We also need to consider the land use zoning, whether it allows the use of a dog park, and ideally having some complementary uses nearby as well as other recreational sites. Adequate parking is another consideration as well as the proximity of utilities; we do not want to impact too much on those.
So we are very eager to hear feedback from the community. I am very happy if the address of that particular block could be provided to my office so that we can be made aware of it and provide it to TCCS for their considerations around a future site. We are very excited about this project and providing future opportunities for dog exercise in the Lanyon Valley.
MR DAVIS: I am glad to see everybody is as enthusiastic as I am. Given the success of co-locating community facilities at the Tuggeranong dog park, like the learn to ride school, would the ACT government consider co-locating other community facilities along with any new Lanyon dog park and, if so, what kind of facilities?
MR STEEL: As I mentioned, we will be looking specifically at whether we can co-locate the dog park with other facilities and what opportunities that might provide—shared use of parking, for example, might be one thing. The Tuggeranong dog park, of course, has been upgraded with a new toilet. So we will be looking at what opportunities there are, as well as where people are already using sites for dog walking. Mr Davis mentioned one particular site, but there is another site that TCCS
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